[lupire]

Anyone who wants attention is motivated to do SEO. Should engines downrank every site that has good SEO? That is, downrank every site that ranks highly?

They already look at things like clickthroughand dwell time and bounce back. If enough people dislike Example.com enough to avoid clicking on it or come back to search after visiting it, the engine learns that it is a bad result.

Maybe the problem is that most people like what you don't like.

[Calavar]

No, they key is to differentiate SEO'd pages with useful content from SEO'd pages with useless content.

This is a game as old as search engines. In 2005, it meant filtering out sites that were just lists of keywords, not coherent sentences and paragraphs. It meant for giving extra points to articles with structure, such as header tags and paragraphs, as opposed to just blobs of text. It meant using PageRank to organically discover which pages real people thought were useful.

It's a much subtler and more difficult problem in 2022, but there are also better tools to do it (big NLG models). It just seems that Google lost interest in quality control at some point.

And I would guess they lost interest in quality control because of Chrome's market penetration. Chrome is a browser monopoly at this point, and with Google being the default search engine on Chrome, they no longer have to give quality results to maintain their search user base. On top of that, they control such a large share of the ad market that any SEO spam website is more likely than not to be using AdSense. Which means they have a financial incentive to deliver page views to SEO spam sites, which tend to have higher ad/content ratios.

[Consultant32452]

This seems like a good fit for a ! solution like duckduckgo. !gov !universities These may already exist.

[ajmurmann]

That stuff definitely helps. That's also why do many now just search Reddit. However, wouldn't it be nice if the search engine could be smart enough to figure that out itself?

[derefr]

The problem is that people clicking+dwelling on something is not highly correlated with it serving their needs.

See: clickbait YouTube videos that show you something you really want to see in the thumbnail, then spend 10 minutes doing something else before showing it, and when you see it it’s a tiny aside with no more context than what you got in the thumbnail. If it’s even in the video at all.

Those videos have both high clickthrough (thus “click bait”) and also high dwell time (from people waiting for the thing they wanted to see to show up.) They do also have high bounceback, but only from people who recognize what’s going on. “A new sucker’s born every minute”, and those suckers will click the video and watch it, because they don’t yet know the principle that this specific kind of enticing thumbnail+title format implies that they won’t find what they want here.

These metrics all measure, effectively, “wanting” rather than “having.” It’s like measuring food by how addictive it is, rather than by how satisfied it makes you. You’ll end up optimizing toward cheetos — literally flavoured air — rather than toward anything that fills your stomach. People might enjoy cheetos while they’re eating them, but if they’re genuinely hungry, cheetos won’t solve their problem — they’ll still be hungry afterward.